About Me

Fancy bio you can copy and paste into things

Maureen Johnson is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of several YA novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, Suite Scarlett, The Name of the Star, and Truly Devious. She has also done collaborative works, such as Let It Snow (with John Green and Lauren Myracle), and The Bane Chronicles (with Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan). Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian, and she has also served as a scriptwriter for EA Games. She has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and lives in New York City.

I sit around looking classy like this all the time. All writers do.

A shorter bio

I write books.

A longer bio

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Many people claim this, but in my case it is true. I was born in a hospital that no longer exists! Well, it exists, but in a different building. They tore down the building I was born in and now it is just a smoldering hole in the ground! (Or a Subway or something. I don’t know. I don’t just hang around where I was born. I was born and I just got on with it! I never looked back! I URGE YOU TO DO THE SAME.)

I was an only child, which means that I know how to play Candyland by myself. I was always one of those reading and writing kids. After a little dalliance with astronomy (I had a glow in the dark star chart) and archaeology (I had a little shovel), I declared my intention to become a writer at the age of eight or nine or so. “I shall be a writer,” I said. “And I will develop no other skills to ensure I have no back up plan!”

I graduated from the University of Delaware, home of the Fighting Blue Hens. I was a writing major, but I spent most of my time working on shows. After college, I became the literary manager of a wonderful (but now defunct) Philadelphia theater company. Soon after that, I moved to New York to study theatrical dramaturgy and writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. As a graduate student, I held at least a dozen different jobs to pay my way through school. These included: working in a haunted house theme restaurant, being a fake employee for a company to make it look like more people worked there than actually did, and working on a show in Las Vegas that had live tigers and malfunctioning smoke machines in the same enclosed area. I was also an editor.

I spend most of my time writing books. You can find out more about those books by clicking on the BOOKS link above.